Though the term NATIVE SPEAKER/SIGNER is frequently used in language research, it is inconsistently conceptualized. Factors, such as age, order, and context of acquisition, in addition to social/cultural identity, are often differentially conflated. While the ambiguity and harmful consequences of the term NATIVE SPEAKER have been problematized across disciplines, much of this literature attempts to repurpose the term in order to include and/or exclude certain populations. This paper problematizes NATIVE SPEAKER within psycholinguistics, arguing that the term is both unhelpful to rigorous theory construction and harmful to marginalized populations by reproducing normative assumptions about behavior, experience, and identity. We propose that language researchers avoid NATIVE SPEAKER altogether, and we suggest alternate ways of characterizing language experience/use. The vagueness of NATIVE SPEAKER can create problems in research design (e.g., through systematically excluding certain populations), recruitment (as participants’ definitions might diverge from researchers’), and analysis (by distilling continuous factors into under-specified binary categories). This can result in barriers to cross-study comparison, which is particularly concerning for theory construction and replicability. From a research ethics perspective, it matters how participants are characterized and included: Excluding participants based on binary/essentialist conceptualizations of nativeness upholds deficit perspectives toward multilingualism and non-hegemonic modes of language acquisition. Finally, by implicitly assuming the existence of a critical period, NATIVE SPEAKER brings with it theoretical baggage which not all researchers may want to carry. Given the issues above and how ‘nativeness’ is racialized (particularly in European and North American contexts), we ask that researchers consider carefully whether exclusion of marginalized/minoritized populations is necessary or justified—particularly when NATIVE SPEAKER is used only as a way to achieve linguistic homogeneity. Instead, we urge psycholinguists to explicitly state the specific axes traditionally implied by NATIVENESS that they wish to target. We outline several of these (e.g., order of acquisition, allegiance, and comfort with providing intuitions) and give examples of how to recruit and describe participants while eschewing NATIVE SPEAKER. Shifting away from harmful conventions, such as NATIVE SPEAKER, will not only improve research design and analysis, but also is one way we can co-create a more just and inclusive field.

Though the term NATIVE SPEAKER/SIGNER is frequently used in language research, it is inconsistently conceptualized. Factors such as age, order, and context of acquisition, in addition to social/cultural identity, are often differentially conflated. While the ambiguity and harmful consequences of the term NATIVE SPEAKER have been problematized across disciplines, much of this literature attempts to repurpose the term in order to include and/or exclude certain populations. This paper problematizes NATIVE SPEAKER within psycholinguistics, arguing that the term is both unhelpful to rigorous theory construction and harmful to marginalized populations by reproducing normative assumptions about behavior, experience, and identity. We propose that language researchers avoid NATIVE SPEAKER altogether, and we suggest alternate ways of characterizing language experience/use.The vagueness of NATIVE SPEAKER can create problems in research design (e.g., through systematically excluding certain populations), recruitment (as participants’ definitions might diverge from researchers’), and analysis (by distilling continuous factors into under-specified binary categories). This can result in barriers to cross-study comparison, which is particularly concerning for theory construction and replicability. From a research ethics perspective, it matters how participants are characterized and included: Excluding participants based on binary/essentialist conceptualizations of nativeness upholds deficit perspectives towards multilingualism and non-hegemonic modes of language acquisition. Finally, by implicitly assuming the existence of a critical period, NATIVE SPEAKER brings with it theoretical baggage which not all researchers may want to carry.Given the issues above and how ‘nativeness’ is racialized (particularly in European and North American contexts), we ask that researchers consider carefully whether exclusion of marginalized/minoritized populations is necessary or justified—particularly when NATIVE SPEAKER is used only as a way to achieve linguistic homogeneity. Instead, we urge psycholinguists to explicitly state the specific axes traditionally implied by NATIVENESS that they wish to target. We outline several of these (e.g., order of acquisition, allegiance, comfort with providing intuitions), and give examples of how to recruit and describe participants while eschewing NATIVE SPEAKER. Shifting away from harmful conventions such as NATIVE SPEAKER will not only improve research design and analysis, but is also one way we can co-create a more just and inclusive field.

Bilinguals often codeswitch between languages mid-sentence. Do incongruent codeswitches, which follow the word order of only one language, occur? If so, how do bilinguals comprehend them, given the clash in grammaticality? First, we demonstrated that incongruent codeswitches occur, based on a corpus analysis of Spanish-English speech. Then, we measured bilinguals’ assessments of congruent codeswitches (Experiment 1) and incongruent codeswitches (Experiment 2) using an offline rating task. This task was sensitive to codeswitching costs and grammaticality. More importantly, the ratings for incongruent codeswitches supported the Current Word hypothesis, which predicts that codeswitches follow the word order of the language of the current word, but not the Matrix Language hypothesis (Myers-Scotton, 2002). These results can be understood within a bilingual comprehension theory in which activation spreads from words in the input to language-independent grammatical structures, leading bilinguals to make language-independent predictions about the syntactic category of upcoming words.